


The Dancing Men

by 221b_hound



Series: The Pure and Simple Truth [10]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Dancing, M/M, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-25
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-12-06 18:37:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11606583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson have a better truth to teach to their daughter now, at the start of their next great adventure. At the same time, another Holmes and Watson have their own new adventures to plan.





	The Dancing Men

“The cars are here!” called out Mrs Hudson from downstairs.

“On our way!” John called back. Sherlock stopped to kiss Rosie’s forehead, ran his fingers, as was his habit, across the red coat hanging on the hook by the door, next to his Belstaff and John’s coat, and was on his way. 

A moment later, John, two-year-old Rosie in his arms, followed. He brushed his fingers over the red coat too, then had to step back a moment later when Rosie shouted “Bye bye Mama!” so that she could pat it as well.

Sherlock’s car had already gone when John reached Baker Street. Mrs Hudson held Rosie’s hand while he climbed into the black car, then helped the little girl in her white and ruby red tulle dress to get in beside him.

“Bye bye Gran!” said Rosie, waving energetically.

“See you soon, Rosie Rose!” sang back Mrs Hudson. John grinned at the pair of them, in his dark blue morning suit.

The car drove off in the wake of Sherlock’s, and Mrs Hudson returned to her flat to finish pinning up her hair.

*

Grey was not the best colour for camouflage but Mycroft found a place to hide anyway. While the photographer was trying to get Rosie to pose with the best man, and getting very stroppy about it, Mycroft slid away to skulk behind a cherry laurel hedge, and lit up.

Harry popped up next to him a moment later. He was almost relieved.

“Thank fuck,” she muttered, loosening the red tie that matched his own. She side-eyed the e-cigarette he held in his fingers.

“Don’t start,” he said darkly.

“Vaping, huh? How’s that working for you?”

Mycroft wrinkled his nose at the vapour wreathing around the stem. “It keeps my doctor, my mother and my personal assistant from nagging. It’s not so bad.” He offered it to her and she took a drag on it.

“What is that? Is that fucking butterscotch flavoured?” Harry drew on it again. “Not bad, actually.”

Somewhere beyond the hedge, Rosie was protesting, “No! No! No!” and Sherlock was making cooing noises at her. “Let Papa hug you. That’s better.”

“I also have vanilla bean cartridges, cherry, and a Virginian tobacco for nostalgia.”

“Fuck. You could convince me.” She inhaled again and passed the e-cigarette back. “It’d get Johnnie off my back. Not that he says anything, but I think he’s trained Rosie to give me _looks_.”

“That may just be her naturally judgemental demeanour. Her mother was just the same.”

“She never let you get away with anything, anyway.”

“Quite.”

“She’d have liked today.”

“She would.”

For a while they stood in contented seclusion, sharing the e-cigarette and listening to Rosie finish her tantrum while John and Sherlock sang to her. They could tell from her wild giggling that fathers, photographer, parents of the groom and best persons were all engaged in the task.

“They’re dancing, aren’t they?” asked Harry.

Mycroft risked a peek. “Yes they are. Some kind of duck dance, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Good thing we took off. Preserved our dignity by hiding in the shrubbery.”

Mycroft stuck his tongue out at her, and Harry laughed smokily. She stood on tiptoe to see how the photos were progressing. Mummy and Daddy were holding hands and gazing on their youngest son with the sappiest expressions she had ever had the misfortune to see. Molly, dressed in a swirling blue dress, was watching Sherlock whirl Rosie around in a dance – the photographer was snapping away at the looks on their faces, and of John’s as he watched them. Greg, in a grey suit of his own, was watching Molly.

“They’ve sorted themselves out then,” said Harry, ducking back.

“Yes. Ms Hooper has embraced her own happiness at last,” said Mycroft.

“She’s a cutie.”

“Is she?”

“Though I like Greg’s mate. She’s hot.”

“Greg’s…? Oh. You mean Sergeant Donovan.”

“That’s her. What do you know about her?”

“Nothing.”

“You are such a liar.”

“Such accusations!”

“Ha. She’s involved with Sherlock. Of course you know all about her.”

“That would be an egregious misuse of governmental resources…”

“Such. A. Liar.”

“You’re not unlike Mary yourself, you know.”

“I’ll take that as the compliment you intended it to be.” Harry grinned at him.

“She’s hopelessly straight, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Bugger. Oh well. She’s still hot. But you’re right. Falling for straights is a one way trip to hell.” She nudged him, drawing his gaze away from Greg Lestrade.

“I wouldn’t know.”

Harry didn’t call him a liar.  Instead she said, “You know those pacts people make, that if they’re still single in ten years they’ll get married?”

“Do I need to remind you that you’re gay?”

“And you’re about as straight as a hairpin yourself.”

“There is that.”

“I was thinking more that if we’re still mooching around in five years, we should make a pact to go shag-hunting at the gay bars together. You can find me hot, bossy women who remind you of Lauren Bacall and I’ll find you a nice Papa Bear. Or a silver fox.”

“Silver bear?”

“Or Papa Fox. You’d like that.”

Suddenly, Sherlock’s voice rose up from beyond the hedge. “Mycroft! Harry! Photographs!”

“Poto-gaff!” agreed Rosie gleefully.

“Photograph,” repeated Sherlock, enunciating it clearly.

“Fuddyguff!” shouted Rosie.

“That’s right, sweetheart,” laughed John.  Harry and Mycroft emerged to find John pointing at them. “Uncle My wants a fuddyguff.”

Uncle My gave John a quelling glare, which made Rosie squeal with laughter. “Fuddy guff!” She reached for her uncle and he gathered her into his arms, trying to avoid a faceful of tulle and succeeding only in getting a very wet kiss on the eye.

Mummy took a photograph. Daddy beamed.

Mycroft snuck a look at Harry Watson, who grinned mercilessly at him.

She was, he decided, his favourite pest.

*

Speeches were made. Molly’s Best Person speech for Sherlock stuttered only a little, and made a passing reference to friends that help you hide the bodies, “but that was only that one time, and he came back”.  Greg talked about two great men, who were also good men, good fathers, good friends. Mycroft raised toasts; so did Harry.

Rosie ran around showing off the necklace she wore, bearing a toy magnifying glass, a toy thermometer, a little plastic frame containing a smiling picture of her mother. “Say aaaaahhhh!” she insisted before telling the guests, “All better!”

Then the music began.

*

John took Sherlock in his arms and, as they’d rehearsed so often – and once before, long before even this wedding – they swept around the dance floor together. John couldn’t stop smiling, partly because Sherlock couldn’t either. They beamed at each other and didn’t seem to see the rest of the room.

Sherlock’s strange books of almost two years ago were barely even a memory now. That concoction of fantasy and guilt, with a John and Mary and Sherlock who were hardly ever themselves, had been burned to ashes. They had this truth to teach to their daughter now. That her Daddy and her Papa had always been the very best of best friends. That they had both loved her Mama, who had loved them too, and the three of them had also been the very best of best friends. And when Mama died and had to leave, Rosie’s Daddy and her Papa had kept her mama’s love with them and became the best and most loving forever friends they knew how to be.

Rosie clapped her hands and demanded a dance too, and her Poppy Giles lifted her up to whirl her around the dance floor.

There were still sad parts to the story. The saddest was that Mama couldn’t stay the way she and Daddy and Papa had wanted her to. And it was sad that Daddy and Auntie Harry’s mum didn’t know them anymore.

But Rosie had her auntie, and her Uncle My, and Gran Martha, and Poppy Giles and Nanna Lea. She had Aunt Molly and Uncle Greg, too.

Molly and Greg had joined the grooms on the dance floor and they laughed and looked at each other the way Sherlock and John looked at each other. Then Mrs Hudson took Rosie for a dance so that Giles could dance with Leandra.

Mycroft offered his arm to Harry.

“You trust me not to step on your feet?” she asked, laughing.

“I won’t feel it in at least one of them,” he asserted. The fit of the current prosthetic was excellent and he hadn’t been dancing in ages. “Besides, I should get into practice for the shag-hunting down the track.”

“That’s the spirit,” Harry said, and she let him lead. At least for the first dance.

It was a small wedding, but full of people who mattered to the grooms, who danced well into the evening, until their last dance: Sherlock and John and their daughter Rosie in their arms between them. A family.

This day was the start of a new adventure. Not their only adventure, or their last, but perhaps their favourite, and it lasted for the rest of their long lives.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this Alternative series to reclaim the characters I loved for myself, and accidentally found new ones to love along the way. Thank you for coming with me on the journey.


End file.
